A Comprehensive Description of Public Health Emergency Preparedness

In presenting and evaluating the Common Ground Preparedness Framework (CGPF) in comparison to four other major public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) frameworks, the authors found the CGPF's description of PHEP activities to be comprehensive, and will reduce confusion about public health’s role in emergency response.

The CGPF outlines processes to address emergencies that may overwhelm a public health system's everyday capabilities. There are six categories of processes: (1) prepare; (2) monitor; (3) investigate; (4) intervene; (5) manage; and (6) recover. Each category falls within the time periods of preincident, incident, and postincident.

The four major frameworks to which the authors compared the CGPF were RAND Corporation’s PREPARE Pandemic Influenza Quality Improvement Toolkit (PPI), the National Response Framework’s Public Health and Medical Services Functional Areas (NRF), the National Health Security Strategy Capabilities List (NHSS), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s PHEP Capabilities (PHEP-C). The CGPF was more precise than the NRF and relatively similar to PHEP-C, while the NHSS had a deeper recovery process, and PPI included more contextual factors than the CGPF.

CGPF is comprehensive and consistent with other PHEP frameworks, and by using concepts familiar to public health workers, will reduce confusion about public health's role in emergency response. The authors suggest enhancing the CGPF with contextual factors, and enhancing the recovery process similarly to the NHSS.